Susan Thananopavarn.

LatinAsian Cartographies: History, Writing, and the National

Imaginary. Latinidad: Transnational Cultures in the United States Series. New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018. Illustrations. 216 pp. $120.00, cloth, ISBN
978-0-8135-8985-5.

Reviewed by Nicolás Camino (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile)

Published on H-Borderlands (January, 2022)

Commissioned by María de los Ángeles Picone (Boston College)

In LatinAsian Cartographies, Susan Thanano‐
pavarn challenges the national imaginary of the
United States and its construction since the last
years of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the
experiences of the Latino/a and Asian American
communities in this country, she asserts that the
presence of both groups has been ignored in the
construction of the national imaginary. For this
purpose, the book analyzes literary works pro‐
duced by members of these communities to con‐
trast them with the traditional narratives of the
United States.
The first chapter of the book focuses on how
narratives about US imperialism and its con‐
sequences have been excluded from the national
imaginary. Through the analysis of Carlos Bu‐
losan’s America Is in the Heart: A Personal His‐
tory (1973) and Américo Paredes’s George Wash‐
ington Gómez: A Mexicotexan Novel (1990),
Thananopavarn examines the violence and dis‐
crimination suffered by minorities after the Phil‐
ippine-American War and the expansion (a
concept that she criticizes) to the south. By using
literary works to analyze the structural violence
suffered by minorities during those years, the au‐
thor states that it is a necessary counternarrative
that can contest the hegemonic political discourses
on the United States’ national imaginary. Thanano‐
pavarn emphasizes the consequences that this in‐
tentional amnesia has had in the educational sys‐
tem, with such states as Arizona and Texas trying
to erase US imperialism from their curricula.
The narratives about US involvement in
World War II—the fight for freedom and the “good
war”—have been one of the foundations of US for‐
eign policy and a central aspect of its cultural
memory. In chapter 2, Thananopavarn studies the
groups that were perceived as outsiders to the
country during the conflict. In Mitsuye Yamada’s
Camp Notes and Other Poems (1976) and Luis
Valdez’s Zoot Suit and Other Plays (1978), charac‐
ters that are North American citizens are victims
of violence and exclusion by their own compatri‐
ots, based on racial prejudices. This analysis aims
to reframe the discourses about the conflict by ex‐
plicitly showing that discrimination and violence

against minorities were part of the construction of
the North American narrative, which, as Thanano‐
pavarn states, hid in plain sight the strongly
rooted patriotic racism in the United States.
In chapter 3, Thananopavarn studies the im‐
pact North American imperialism during the Cold
War had on Latino/a and Asian American com‐
munities, focusing on US interventions abroad—
an echo from the first chapter but under slightly
different logics. This chapter analyzes two novels
published decades after the events they narrate,
with protagonists who grew up in the United
States as a direct consequence of central conflicts
of the early Cold War: the Korean War and the
Cuban Revolution. What makes this chapter espe‐
cially interesting is how Thananopavarn analyzes
the memories of Chang/Chuck Ahn (from Susan
Choi’s The Foreign Student [1998]) and Juani Casas
(from Achy Obejas’s Memory Mambo [1996]). The
protagonists of both novels seem to be trapped in
a memory that they do not recognize as their own,
which is presented as an analogy of the dichotom‐
ic approaches taken by Cold War studies and their
application to Latin America and Asia. In this sec‐
tion, Thananopavarn makes a compelling state‐
ment about Cold War studies: the need to go bey‐
ond these binary narratives, addressing the com‐
plex structures operating within minorities, as ex‐
emplified by sexual violence in both novels.
There has been a growing interest in the study
of modern narratives about globalization and the
impact of this process in the social composition of
urban areas. In chapter 4, through the analysis of
Cristina Garcia’s Lady Matador’s Hotel (2010) and
Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997),
Thananopavarn argues that cities in the United
States are contact zones in which asymmetries are
conveyed under a liberal discourse of multicultur‐
alism. She focuses on the criticism of how these
narratives are sustained by a market logic, in
which the traditions of a group are identified as
products to be consumed by the white population.
The topics of this chapter are important for those
2
H-Net Reviews
looking to study the development and impact of
“cultural appropriation”—the extraction of sur‐
plus from marginalized groups through the com‐
modification of their culture and traditions.
In the last chapter, Thananopavarn opens the
question about what can be considered as “Latino/
a” or “Asian American” literature and what au‐
thors and texts belong to these groups. The ques‐
tion does not only defy national borders as a clas‐
sifying criterion but also challenges the role
played by language and race in the definition of
these categories. For this purpose, she analyzes
the protagonist from one of the stories in Siu Kam
Wen’s El tramo final ("The Final Stretch"), pub‐
lished in 1998. Uei-Kuong represents for Thanano‐
pavarn a character whose identity is trapped
between racial, geographic, and linguistic categor‐
izations, not being able to be identified in one of
them. This challenges the traditional classifica‐
tions, recognizing that there are multiple elements
that have been used to determine the belonging to
a certain group or community. The disputes about
the boundaries that have traditionally delimited
North American national imaginary are also the
ones built by minorities, indicating that borders
have become blurrier.
LatinAsian Cartographies’s schematic struc‐
ture makes the book very useful for teaching, as
each separate chapter can be read independently
without significant difficulties, making it possible
to study defined periods and topics. This leads to
some fragmentation in the analysis of the com‐
munities through the book, as the experiences
narrated focus on specific groups (for example,
Philippine and Mexican in the first chapter,
Korean and Cuban in chapter 3); the proposal of a
counternarrative that includes all the covered top‐
ics in the conclusion might have been a way to ad‐
dress this. Still, this does not make the argument
of LatinAsian Cartographies less effective, as it is
clear how all the elements presented dispute the
traditional national imaginary of the United States
and the narratives built since the last years of the
 H-Net Reviews

nineteenth century. These questions open the pos‐

sibility to bring back the political connotation to
concepts and events that have been stripped out
of its significance and defined by the hegemonic
epistemology operating in this country.
Across the globe, various social movements
have started to question traditional historical nar‐
ratives and figures. In this context, LatinAsian
Cartographies is an interesting and relevant book.
The presentation of the analyzed works is enjoy‐
able, and it is hard not to feel compelled to read
some of them. This might seem as accessory, but in
my opinion, it is central for the argument of the
book: it encourages the reading of Latino/a and
Asian American works to contest and redefine the
United States’ national imaginary. The challenges
faced by the traditional narratives should be ad‐
dressed and LatinAsian Cartographies is a step in
this direction. As Thananopavarn states in the
core of the book, it is crucial to include minorities’
cultural production in the study of US national
imaginary. Hopefully, it will be a matter of time
for these narratives to stop being auxiliary and be‐
come incorporated at the core of the national ima‐
ginary of a growingly majority-minority United
States.

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Citation: Nicolás Camino. Review of Thananopavarn, Susan. LatinAsian Cartographies: History, Writing,
and the National Imaginary. H-Borderlands, H-Net Reviews. January, 2022.

URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54304

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